


Names Die While Legends Linger

by LettersofSky



Series: Distant Past Zine Pieces [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Dash of Depersonalization, Implied Pale Summleer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-23 16:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21084695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LettersofSky/pseuds/LettersofSky
Summary: A bit of an introspection into what it becomes to stop truly being someone and become something before the end.





	Names Die While Legends Linger

**Author's Note:**

> One of my main pieces created for the Distant Past Zine: https://twitter.com/distantpastzine  
I was so excited to be able to create content for my favourite ancestor along so many other wonderful artists and creators!  
When with some Summoner Introspective after things were said and done and his part in the story started to draw to a close.

You are The Summoner.

That’s the only name that really matters anymore so that’s all you’ll call yourself by.

Your true name, your first name, the name you chose for yourself upon your first pupation trying to change what your lusus had called you into a word you could attach your identity to and carried with you for most of your life, it’s been lost to you now. It has been far too long since you’ve used it for yourself, since anyone else’s used it in reference to you. Mindfang had preferred your title, most everyone had preferred the name you’d fashioned for yourself at the beginning of your rebellion from whispers and rumours. Except for… but he’d left long before the end of things, running when it had all started to take a turn for the worst for all of you; the number of trolls that returned from missions grew lesser and lesser, supplies started to dry up, allies disappeared and turned against you and… You hadn’t blamed him, couldn’t blame him for it because maybe… maybe Rufioh Nitram would have done the same thing, at one point in time.

But that didn’t really matter did it? It didn’t matter that ‘Summoner’ wasn’t your true name because Rufioh Nitram wasn’t important in this story. Besides, he’d already departed this world, had abandoned and left it when Mindfang had urged him to drive his lance clean through her torso, words honeyed sweet and comforting in his skull even as her breath grew wet and horrid with the blood in her lungs, urging him forward, onwards, _you can do it I want you too_…

Rufioh Nitram had perished then, his matesprits body cradled in his arms and bleeding out from the merciful blow of his lance straight through her pumper.

It was The Summoner’s turn today.

The Summoner’s battle was lost. Your way, your rebellion, over and the Highbloods all the more enraged for your part in it, for the lives of theirs that you brought to a sudden and abrupt end with all of the care they had ever shown you and yours. They were demanding your execution now; you knew that it was coming and the most care you could give that notion was the singular breath of relief in that it wouldn’t be… wouldn’t be Darkleer firing the arrow at you. You’d had more than enough of quadmates culling each other for the perigee. You would consider it a small kindness from the cruel world you existed in, small yes, miniscule at best, but one you were more than a little glad for all the same.

Currently, you were awaiting your escorts, alone in your cell with no window to allow light or fresh air in, leaving you cut off from the world but for the barest hint of dull, weak light that managed to creep it’s way under the door and allowed you just enough light to barely be able to see some of the details of the room you were in with your warm-blooded eyes. It’s nothing impressive, the only thing of any kind of interest around you being the markings left by prior occupants and prisoners of the Highbloods; claw marks of varying lengths and desperation, some steady and deliberate in the walls as trolls attempted to guess at the passing of time and others messier, frantic on the floor, detailing their final desperate struggle to deny their death, to escape the fate that was awaiting them at the hands of the Highbloods dragging them from the safety and solitude of the cut-off, isolated room. You swear you could smell where terror and hopeless resignation had sunken so deep into the freezing stones of the walls it had permanently stained the still, stale air around you.

You have nothing to do in here, nothing to keep your hands or thoughts busy so you can allow yourself to think, to think and dwell on things for far longer than you’ve ever let yourself at any other time because there was always something more important to focus on, some plan or strategy, some big thing that required all your attention and you just didn’t have the time. But now, now you don’t know when the Highbloods will come to drag you out of your room before the remaining infestation your army hadn’t managed to cull from the face of Alternia.

So you have the time to do it, you have the time, the opportunity, to think.

…

You can’t recall a time Mindfang ever used your true name, at least not before she’d been guiding you through the motions that would finally release her from her mortal coil, which is more the pity because you would have liked to hear it in her voice, in her actual voice and not the echoing, all-consuming facsimile of it in your skull or the wet, breathless choking of it with her colour in her lungs. It would have sent you spiralling, free-falling into the reddest of feelings for her to finally know that she’d seen you as more than The Summoner, more than the image of a general in her seeing-orb, more than the matesprit that would take her life from her.

You think, you would have liked if she saw Rufioh instead of The Summoner, even if it was just the once. Maybe you could have come to know the troll underneath Mindfang’s smooth taking and weaving web of influence and half-truths.

… But maybe that was just the fantasy of a wriggler that still wanted so much to be wholly seen and not found lacking despite his… abnormalities.

It didn’t matter, the past was dead and gone and Mindfang had only cared for Summoner, not Rufioh. Rufioh… hadn’t even been a blip on her radar. You could admit to that.

But Darkleer… he’d given a damn about Rufioh.

He’d taken your name and kept it close to his pumper, breathed it from his mouth like it was something important, something deserving to be spoken into the air and allowed to hold attention and regard in their lives. Darkleer… he’d ensured that you knew that there would always be time to just be Rufioh when the expectations of The Summoner grew too much for your ill-prepared shoulders to handle, he gave you time and a place where you could put aside the clown’s movements, the mounting body control of your army, the looming knowledge that this was useless, futile, doomed, and you could just… you could just be Rufioh for a few minutes. Rufioh who loved the lusus that taught him to fly, Rufioh who had hid his mutation even though his shoulders and wing stubs ached from being bound down so tightly and for so long, Rufioh who’d worked endlessly, tirelessly, just to make things the tiniest bit easier for whoever came in after he left.

He’d let you be a troll when you’d started to forget what that was like, you were so grateful for that. So very grateful to have had that for the brief period of time he’d stopped being terrified of stepping out of place and earning your culling ire and you’d let yourself trust the turncoat’s traitorous pumper long enough to relax into his regard. Darkleer had liked your name, had liked speaking it, saying it when nobody else did and keeping it like it was something precious, something that was wholly his and wasn’t that such a pathetic thing? To hold so much pride in being given something so small, so minute and insignificant?

But then you’d… you’d felt the same at being given his name in return. A name kept by monsters and stripped away from him like so much of him as an individual troll until he was nothing more than another cog in the Empire’s churning machinery.

Which was a shame because Horuss was such a good name.

You’d used it when he’d left, just like he’d used Rufioh when he’d requested forgiveness, soft and quiet and directed towards the earth with a difference that turned your stomach and made you all too aware of where you both started out. But you’d already long forgiven him; forgiven him when his brows refused to unfurrow and he started to walk like a hunted creature at the edges of camp again, forgiven him when you’d found his makeshift hive dark and abandoned like he’d only been a ghost you’d imagined into creation to help you deal with everything and…

Horuss had tried, he’d tried to get the words together to make you understand, stuttering and stammering, losing his words amongst sharp clicks and noises of panic and distress you hadn’t been able to ease because you couldn’t… you couldn’t let yourself touch him, to shush and calm him, reassure that he could get out the words that would tear apart your trust in him, shatter you both and you’d wanted… You’d wanted to protect that bit of yourself that was still Rufioh and not The Summoner so you didn’t. You held yourself stiff and still and waited he petered off, Horuss’ voice dying in the expansive space between you both as you did your best to hold both Rufioh and Summoner in your head at once.

Because while The Summoner’s decision should have been to put an end to the turncoat, the deserter, to stop him from leaving and potentially leading the Highbloods back to them in order to garter favour or forgiveness in proving his worth and value to them or any other logical reason that would have made Summoner well-justified in culling Darkleer.

But Rufioh…

You’d let him go, you couldn’t ask him to stay with you, couldn’t ask him to potentially watch you die even if it would have soothed something in you to have him there to watch your back and potentially die for you in turn but… but he deserved more than that.

You wanted more for him than that, he deserved to have his ending separated form the Highbloods that had controlled his life and while The Summoner should have brought the Expatriate to hell and culled him for his desertion, Rufioh couldn’t do that to Horuss.

You hadn’t asked him to stay. You hadn’t impaled him for daring to leave.

No.

Instead you’d reach out and up, not too much since he was still directing his whole form towards the dirt beneath your feet in a futile hope to disappear into it as you knew he was, to touch him. To bring his forehead to yours and in light of moons not yet risen you’d wished him the best of luck and a kind death when if eventually came for him. You’d thought yourself strong, believed that you’d be able to bare this with all of The Summoner’s fortitude and solidity but then… Then he’d slumped against you with a noise that sounded so much like this was physically hurting him that Rufioh was brought low by it. You had a stray thought, wild and momentary, that perhaps he’d falter, that Horuss’ resolve would shatter like so many panes of colour glass. But he hadn’t, he was far stronger, far weaker, than that and oh how you had pitied him then, pitied the both of you.

He’d left you standing there, alone and overlooking an army preparing for what was more than likely gearing up to be their final few nights of existing and you… you hadn’t been able to watch him go, you couldn’t bring yourself to do that to yourself. So you’d tucked Rufioh away then, he wasn’t needed with the Highbloods drawing closer and closer and a collection of Lowbloods looking to him for guidance and reassurance that this wasn’t worthless, wasn’t meaningless, was actually and truly meant something.

Rufioh may have been the one to scale the hill to confront Horuss for his decision to leave, but it was The Summoner and Expatriate that took their separate ways down.

The Highbloods had descended upon the camp within the next few nights, meeting an army prepared for them and with nothing to lose but the very breath in their lungs and the very rights to existence they were all fighting so desperately for, freedom and equality and the rights that should have been theirs as much as it was the Highbloods despite how much warmer they were than the others. The Highbloods may have been the ones to emerge victorious from the battle but there was no denying the blood it had cost them, a small victory, hollow and spiteful amidst a tremendous loos, but one you were going to keep close and warm in your pumper up until they stole the very life from you. It was nothing and it was petty but it was wholly yours in this story, an achievement you would be proud to carry to your grace.

The Summoner – Rebel Scum and Culler of Clowns

You’d been captured at that battle, captured instead of killed there as a warrior amongst your comrades and companions, brought hundreds of miles in order to be made an example of beyond the entire Empire like The Sufferer before you. A warning to the rest of your kin on the lowest, warmest, most fragile and cruelly treated side of the hemospectrum so that they would not attempt to fight against the ways of The Empire again.

There was no place for Rufioh Nitram amongst that.

You were The Summoner now and you were about to be executed for daring to want something more for, not even for yourself really (it was hard to want anything for yourself when you could hardly settle on a ‘yourself’ to want for) but for those of yours that weren’t in any place to want or hope for better themselves, for those who’d been told from the moment they could comprehend it that they’d never be anything more than tolls to be used and thrown away once they were deemed ‘broken’ by those who thought themselves so much better than them simply because of the colder, bluer blood than ran through them.

The door to your cell opens and with it a sudden burst of agony to your senses.

The slow grinding of moving, rusted metal pierces ears adjusted to silence and you vainly attempt to cast your eyes away from the dramatic increase of light as it’s finally allowed inside. It’s too different, too sudden a change after spending however long you had in the dark, it takes you longer than you want it to for your ears to stop ringing in the renewed quiet, still echoing with the sounds of metal slowly grinding against metal and for your eyes to clear of the figure-shaped-shadow amongst a doorway of burning light imprinted upon them.

You hate that you have to wait to see the faces of whoever it is that’ll be escorting you to your ending, it’s a good tactic you’ll admit but you hate it all the same. You blink as things click back into processing the world around you as they’re supposed to and you feel your pumper freeze in your chest at the image being fed into your think pan.

Where you’d expected to see faceless nobodies, unimportant and uncaring, just there to complete their task and nothing more, instead you lock gazes with the Grand Highblood himself, leader of the Clown Church, main authority of the land and all around complete and utter bastard.

The very same troll who’s orders you’d defied all that time ago at the start of this whole endeavour.

You can… barely even recall back to that point in time, it feels like so, so long ago. Like a whole other life and maybe it had been because it’d been before you were The Summoner, something a lot of trolls you’d interacted with liked to gloss over and pretend never existed.

But you think… you think he might have been ordering you and your squad off on some mission, run of the mill what with the Alternian Military all falling under the Church’s orders at some point or another with the Empress spreading her Tyranny through the stars. But it’d been different because… because it’d been impossible, you’d known it was an impossible endeavour he had been trying to send you off on and you’d tried to tell him that but he hadn’t cared to listen to you. He hadn’t given a single bit of thought to the fact that he’d wanted you and yours to just throw your lives away for nothing when there had been a hundred other, a hundred better, solutions if he had just let go of his pride long enough to just listen, admit to the fact that he didn’t know everything about everything.

And you’d just… you’d had enough.

You hadn’t walked into his throne room with the intention of revealing your mutation, not even in your most horrific sleeping-terrors had the thought ever crossed your mind, and you certainly hadn’t expected to be able to just escape him and his mirthful pack of rabid attack dogs. The dragon had been a neat bonus though, even if more than a handful of trolls insisted that she was actually very haunted by the recently deceased Neophyte, you would allow that she was a neat haunted bonus but that was it.

And from there? It had only escalated and you’d never even had the tiniest want to consider stopping any of it. Not while you were still free to exist as you wanted to.

You hadn’t been expecting to ever see the Grand Highblood again, or at least you’d hoped you wouldn’t see him again, not in this life or whatever counted as the next one, but there he was in all his… questionable glory.

You lift your chin and bare your blunt, Lowblood teeth at him, wings flaring out as much as they’re able to with how they were restrained and you make it clear to him that as much as you’re bound and at every possible disadvantage you will not go down easy if he’s planning to just kill you here and now in this cold, isolated room. You’re not going to fight the fate you’ve been handed in life, you’re not that stupid and there’s nothing left for you anymore, but there’s no way on Alternia that you’re just going to let him put an end to you where no one could see without so much as the barest hint of a struggle.

A name’s breathed into the tense air of the tiny, cold room and you feel yourself freeze; the breath stolen due to your lungs being squeezed tight in your chest.

The Grand Highblood just said your true name.

You don’t… don’t know how he knows that name. You don’t understand, there’s just no possible way he could have known it, could have remembered it after all this time, you’d been a nobody then, there’s no reason for him to have known it in the first place let alone having remembered it up to this point in time.

Rufioh hadn’t been worth remembering, not until after he’d become The Summoner.

Your pumper’s frozen, still and aching in the hollow of your chest, throat tight and a chill stiffening your spine that you know has nothing to do with whatever chucklevoodoos he may be using to put the fear of him into you. You’re left just starting up at the giant, hulking form of the Highblood as he steps further into the rooms, taking up all the free space of it and not even bothering to give you the dignity of pretending he has to worry about you attacking him or, even more unlikely, escaping. Which is more than enough to make you snap back into focus because like hell you’re going to let that continue.

You snarl at him, lips pulling back over your teeth even as your wings attempt to spread further in a display made ineffective by heavy, piercing chains. He doesn’t react at all to your threat, he just rolls his eyes and scoffs at you like you’re some wriggler trying to stand up to a troll fresh from their secondary adult moult and continues to draw closer and closer still until you have nowhere else to go, nowhere to retreat to with how tightly you’re pressing your back against the wall. He kneels in front of you, giving no thought or care to the fact that he’s putting himself so close to your teeth and fangs; like you’ve never been a threat to him and never could be. He reaches out to grasp your chin in a single, giant, blood-stained clawed hand and holding you in place despite your struggles to free yourself of the grip.

You’re trapped now, the wall’s at your back, pressing your wings uncomfortably close to your body and his hand is a freezing iron vice holding you in place and you hate it. You try to snap your teeth, growl as much as you’re able to in your current position, well aware that it holds absolutely nothing to the noises Highbloods are able to create but unwilling to be caught not trying to all the same. You will not let him look down upon you more than he already is, you won’t.

He opens his mouth and his words are low, slow and coiling in your think pan and it causes you to flinch back as much as you can.

He wants you to repent. To beg and plead his forgiveness. The Empire’s forgiveness. Repent for going against the Empire in the way you had, to the extent you had. He wants you to play into his sick amusements by turning traitorous and turncoat yourself to all you’ve worked and strode towards to get to this point in time at your perhaps not inevitable end. To cast The Sufferer and his teachings from your pan and pumper so that you may be spared and allowed to continue to draw breath into your lungs.

Save your own filthy, mutant hide.

Escape the execution block and the mass hollering for your blood to paint the walls of the very church you’d disgraced so long ago.

Become nothing more than a doll he can claim to have re-attached the strings to and become Rufioh Nitram again, loyal worker, subordinate. His play0thing in all the ways someone like you should be.

It’d be so easy, he promises you, soft and quiet and so very persuasive. So easy to just fall into place like he says you were made to do.

But…

Rufioh Nitram had been the one who started all of this.

You had been Rufioh Nitram when you has cast aside your position and told him that you were not going to throw away your life or the life of any of your squad for something so incredibly stupid as a troll who wouldn’t listen to reason and you were the same troll now. The same troll and more besides, no matter what this clown thought of you.

You are no doll. No clown’s play-thing.

You are Rufioh Nitram.

You are The Summoner and yours is not a story that continues past tonight. Yours is not one of great importance or regard, not meant to continue past this point, not meant to linger and over-stay the welcome you were so graciously given.

No.

No, yours is nothing but a steppingstone, a secondary chapter to what was already started by The Sufferer, The Signless, before you. A precursor to what the generations to come will continue with pride in their pumpers and fire in their eyes and you are not going to let this clown ruin any of that. It is not his place any more than it is yours.

You are The Summoner and you spit in the face of the Grand Highblood for his offer, proud and defiant as you ever were in your life, yours might be nothing more than part of a bigger story but you decide how your life draws to its close.

And when you are taken to meet your ending point, bruise blossoming large and bronze on your face, you have eyes only for the highest of purples trained upon you. You don’t look to the crowd of ravenous, cull-thirsty faithful around you, only him.

Your story ends here. But with your death the Signless’ message lives on.

You are just the first of the rebellions he will influence and nowhere near the last.

You go to meet the Handmaid with the certainty of that seared into the very core of you.


End file.
